In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named “Nim Chimpsky” in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim’s teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed—not because Nim couldn’t create sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words. Language is a uniquely human quality, and attempting to find it in animals is wishful thinking at best. The failure of Project Nim meant we were no closer to understanding where language comes from. In this book, Terrace revisits Project Nim to offer a novel view of the origins of human language. In contrast to both Noam Chomsky and his critics, Terrace contends that words, as much as grammar, are the cornerstones of language. Retracing human evolution and developmental psychology, he shows that nonverbal interaction is the foundation of infant language acquisition, leading up to a child’s first words. By placing words and conversation before grammar, we can, for the first time, account for the evolutionary basis of language. Terrace argues that this theory explains Nim’s inability to acquire words and, more broadly, the differences between human and animal communication. Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a masterful statement of the nature of language and what it means to be human.

Includes material on Ally, Koko, Lucy, Nim and Washoe.

An absorbing investigation of chimpanzee language and communication by a young primatologist While working as a zookeeper with a group of semi-wild chimpanzees living on an island, primatologist Andrew Halloran witnessed an event that would cause him to become fascinated with how chimpanzees communicate complex information and ideas to one another. The group he was working with was in the middle of a yearlong power battle in which the older chimpanzees were being ousted in favor of a younger group. One day Andrew carelessly forgot to secure his rowboat at the mainland and looked up to see it floating over to the chimp island. In an orchestrated fashion, five ousted members of the chimp group quietly came from different parts of the island and boarded the boat. Without confusion, they sat in two perfect rows of two, with Higgy, the deposed alpha male, at the back, propelling and steering the boat to shore. The incident occurred without screams or disorder and appeared to have been preplanned and communicated. Since this event, Andrew has extensively studied primate communication and, in particular, how this group of chimpanzees naturally communicated. What he found is that chimpanzees use a set of vocalizations every bit as complex as human language. The Song of the Ape traces the individual histories of each of the five chimpanzees on the boat, some of whom came to the zoo after being wild-caught chimps raised as pets, circus performers, and lab chimps, and examines how these histories led to the common lexicon of the group. Interspersed with these histories, the book details the long history of scientists attempting (and failing) to train apes to use human grammar and language, using the well-known and controversial examples of Koko the gorilla, Kanzi the bonobo, and Nim Chimsky the chimpanzee, all of whom supposedly were able to communicate with their human caretakers using sign language. Ultimately, the book shows that while laboratories try in vain to teach human grammar to a chimpanzee, there is a living lexicon being passed down through the generations of each chimpanzee group in the wild. Halloran demonstrates what that lexicon looks like with twenty-five phrases he recorded, isolated, and interpreted while working with the chimps, and concludes that what is occurring in nature is far more fascinating and miraculous than anything that can be created in a laboratory. The Song of the Ape is a lively, engaging, and personal account, with many moments of humor as well as the occasional heartbreak, and it will appeal to anyone who wants to listen in as our closest relatives converse.

This is the first collection of articles completely and explicitly devoted to the new field of 'comparative developmental evolutionary psychology' - that is, to studies of primate abilities based on frameworks drawn from developmental psychology and evolutionary biology. These frameworks include Piagetian and neo-Piagetian models as well as psycholinguistic ones. The articles in this collection - originating in Japan, Spain, Italy, France, Canada and the United States - represent a variety of backgrounds in human and nonhuman primate research, including psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, cultural and physical anthropology, ethology, and comparative psychology. The book focuses on such areas as the nature of culture, intelligence, language, and imitation; the differences among species in mental abilities and developmental patterns; and the evolution of life histories and of mental abilities and their neurological bases. The species studied include the African grey parrot, cebus and macaque monkeys, gorillas, orangutans, and both common and pygmy chimpanzees.

Current primate research has yielded stunning results that not only threaten our underlying assumptions about the cognitive and communicative abilities of nonhuman primates, but also bring into question what it means to be human. At the forefront of this research, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh recently has achieved a scientific breakthrough of impressive proportions. Her work with Kanzi, a laboratory-reared bonobo, has led to Kanzi's acquisition of linguistic and cognitive skills similar to those of a two and a half year-old human child. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind skillfully combines a fascinating narrative of the Kanzi research with incisive critical analysis of the research's broader linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications. The first part of the book provides a detailed, personal account of Kanzi's infancy, youth, and upbringing, while the second part addresses the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues raised by the Kanzi research. The authors discuss the challenge to the foundations of modern cognitive science presented by the Kanzi research; the methods by which we represent and evaluate the abilities of both primates and humans; and the implications which ape language research has for the study of the evolution of human language. Sure to be controversial, this exciting new volume offers a radical revision of the sciences of language and mind, and will be important reading for all those working in the fields of primatology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive and developmental psychology.

Language is regarded, at least in most intellectual traditions, as the quintessential human attribute, at once evidence and source of most that is considered transcendent in us, distinguishing ours from the merely mechanical nature of the beast. Even if language did not have the sacrosanct status it does in our conception of human nature, however, the question of its presence in other species would still promote argument, for we lack any universally accepted, defining features of language, ones that would allow us to identify it unequivocally ours from other species and contention over the crucial attributes of language are responsible for the stridency of the debate over whether nonhuman animals can learn language. Aping Language is a critical assessment of each of the recent experiments designed to impact a language, either natural or invented, to an ape. The performance of the animals in these experiments is compared with the course of semantic and syntactic development in children, both speaking and signing. The book goes on to examine what is known about the neurological, cognitive, and specifically linguistic attributes of our species that subserve language, and it discusses how they might have come into existence. Finally, the communication of nonhuman primates in nature is assayed to consider whether or not it was reasonable to assume, as the experimenters in these projects did, that apes possess an ability to acquire language.

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work on the language capabilities of the bonobo Kanzi has intrigued the world because of its far-reaching implications for understanding the evolution of the human language. This book takes the reader behind the scenes of the filmed language tests. It argues that while the tests prove that Kanzi has language, the even more remarkable manner in which he originally acquired it - spontaneously, in a culture shared with humans - calls for a re-thinking of language, emphasizing its primal cultural dimensions.

In this mind-opening book, Robbins Burling presents the most convincing - and the most readable - account of the origins of language yet published. He sheds new light on how language affects the way we think, behave, and relate to each other, and he gives us a deeper understanding of the nature of language itself. The author traces language back to its earliest origins among our distant ape-like forbears several million years ago. He offers a new account of the route by which we acquired our defining characteristic and explores the changing nature of language as it developed through the course of our evolution. He considers what the earliest forms of communication are likely to have been, how they worked, and why they were deployed. He examines the qualities of mind and brain needed to support the operations of language and the advantages they offered for survival and reproduction. He investigates the beginnings and prehistories of vocabulary and grammar; and connects work in fields extending from linguistics, sign languages, and psychology to palaeontology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology. And he does all this in a style that is crystal-clear, constantly enlivened by wit and humour.

This anthology was originally planned in connection with a symposium "Language in Primates: Implications for Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, and Philosophy," at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Publication of the book would not have been possible without the support given to the Symposium by many individuals and groups. The Editors thank everyone involved for their kind and generous assistance. Specifi cally, we thank the invited speakers at the Symposium, Thomas A. Sebeok, H. Lyn Miles, Roger S. Fouts, and Thomas Simon. The chapters in this book by Miles, Fouts, and Simon are revised versions of their lectures at the Symposium. We thank Edward Simmel for his encouragement, his patience with our efforts, and his help in planning and directing the Symposium. For their financial assistance, we thank the co-sponsors of the Symposium: the Sigma Chi Foundation/William P. Huffman Scholar-in Residence Program at Miami University, as well as the Departments of Classics, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology and Anthropology at Miami. We thank Barbara Johnson, Polly J. Harris and Brenda Shaw for their secretarial and editorial help, and Shirley Gallimore for her patience, care, good humor, and hard work in typing the manuscript. Finally, we thank the contributors to this volume.